Think for a moment about how you communicate at work. What tools do you use to talk with colleagues on a daily basis? What platforms exist in your chain of communication?
It’s clear that the way we work is changing rapidly. Advances in technology are also rippling down to the way we talk to each other.
Bots are a huge component of that story.
Bots are also shaping the landscape of how we accomplish work for a couple reasons:
- Bots support tools that we already use like Salesforce and Zendesk.
- Bots are rich with use cases that help us accomplish our work, both inside and out of our offices. They help us get work done faster by reducing steps in workflows and providing a level of efficiency, utility, and productivity required in enterprise work.
A Developer’s Guide to Enterprise Messaging
You only need to look back at last year’s installment of South by Southwest (SXSW) to see how influential bots have truly become.
As workplaces are faced with an increasing array of technological advances, bots are truly having their workplace moment. From collaboration to connectivity and engagement to onboarding, bots are helping streamline all sorts of workflows in our offices.
Below, you’ll find what we consider to be the most comprehensive guide to developing bots in the workplace. This is the first part of our news series aimed at showcasing the best examples of available platforms and what makes them the most unique for bots. Our hope is that this guide creates a dialogue for brainstorming your own ideas for enterprise bot use-cases. By highlighting some of the best features and the similarities and differences of their UX capabilities, we believe that developers can take advantage of opportunities for their own creative, innovative applications of bots that will come to define the future of work.
If you’re currently developing or considering developing a bot for any of the top Enterprise Messaging Platforms, this series will help you navigate getting started and avoiding common pitfalls later.
Cisco Spark
Developer Docs: https://developer.ciscospark.com/
What is it: Cisco Spark is an app-centric, cloud-based solution that enables communication across not only your digital workplace, but also the physical products and devices many of us still use to communicate: bulletin boards, desk, and phones. This hybrid approach has created one of the most flexible, simple, and open communication paths that enable team communication before, during, and long after a meeting.
Key Product Features:
- Built for physical products: boards, desks, and phone devices
- Expansive Admin API allows plenty of manager privileges, permissions, and provisioning
- Clearly defined concept of members and rooms to design bot experiences around
Why Developers Should Care: The priority at Cisco is clearly audio + video. And, it shows. But, messaging is their biggest opportunity. Messaging provides the first gateway to the broader Cisco experience.
- The genesis of the Cisco Spark team is an important part of their messaging narrative. They acquired Twilio’s top competitor, Tropo, experts in all things messaging. Their core competence is easily creating rooms and spaces for chatting, editable, public direct messages, and video conferencing
- The Cisco Spark Depot is the hub of all the useful bots and integrations you can build to keep teams productive from project management functionality in Trello’s bot, to note-taking integration with OneNote
- From bots that serve as notifiers, controllers, and assistants — everything is possible with Botkit’s framework. They’re good friends of ours located here in Austin and they even have a helpful starter kit
Message.io 🔥 Take: With a plethora of unique hardware offerings, Cisco provides many opportunities that allow developers to build bots comprised of audio and video use cases that enable users better and faster ways in which to collaborate and communicate at work.
Google Hangouts Chat
Developer Docs: TBD
What is it: Hangouts Chat is Google’s newest approach to team-based messaging. While it encompasses private conversations, team-focused conversations, and multiple threads, it’s most powerful features are the intelligent bots, G-Suite file sharing, and third-party integrations that enable the efficient team collaboration.
Key Product Features:
- Addition of chat functionality from the original video chat conferencing
- As a component of G-Suite, there’s potentially lots of developer opportunities for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Forms, Google Drive and other powerful work-based applications
- If you’re looking for help in meetings, then the @Meet bot is a helpful assistant
Why Developers Should Care: It’s early yet, but we’re keeping a close watch here. It’s not difficult to start visualizing the imaginative and compelling business use cases of working with the @meet bot in addition to the strong likelihood of other integrations with bots similar to that of Slack.
Message.io 🔥 Take: While Google Cloud Platform and the G-Suite begin to go head-to-head with Microsoft Azure and Office 365, Google’s big opportunity will be releasing high-quality video conferencing and messaging products designed with the best interest of secure company chat experiences.
HipChat
Developer docs: https://www.hipchat.com/docs/apiv2
What is it: Developed by Atlassian, HipChat is group messaging designed for teams and businesses. It encompasses group chat, video chat, and screen sharing services. From simple script-based bots to slash commands, HipChat allows developers to create integrations that bring your employees favorite workplace tools directly into HipChat.
Key Product Features:
- Designed specifically for businesses and their extensive use-cases
- Contains persistent, searchable chat (group, video, screen-sharing)
- Security features for IT teams to leverage
- Whether you rely on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, or Linux, HipChat works there
Why Developers Should Care: Atlassian is known to developers around the world because of JIRA, BitBucket, and the extensive Atlassian suite. We know right off the bat, there’s an expectation that it’s a secure and contained space for team-based communication that IT can get behind. As a platform that is supportive of on-premise application hosting, it’s a big deal for those enterprise corporations that have data storage mandates.
Message.io 🔥 Take: It’s easy to imagine the strategic course Atlassian is setting with the recent acquisition of Trello. It’s evident Trello fits nicely into a powerful landscape of products that seamlessly help you get stuff done, without hassle. Taking the conversation out of email threads and into the place where work is happening keeps individuals and teams productive.
HipChat is the O.G. enterprise chat application. With roots back to 2010 (hello, Zynga, Groupon, and Foursquare), they’ve been in the game the longest. They’ve had to react to other market disruptors, yet they have an opportunity to retain a very serious business-savvy audience, in addition to their existing JIRA audience.
Slack
Developer docs: https://api.slack.com/
What is it: Perhaps the most popular enterprise chat channel, Slack has successfully and remarkably paved the way for the modern era of enterprise messaging.
Key Product Features:
- Threaded conversations
- SSL for enterprise
- Interactive messages
- Robust permission controls
- Rich set of chat-focused elements
Why Developers Should Care: Slack is doing a very, very good job messaging their enterprise services to the world. Just take a look at their storytelling and product writing and you can see they lead the pack marketing in support of “where work happens.” They have pioneered a hybrid model that flexes between conversational UI and rich-formatting seen in drop down menus, interactive buttons, and unfurling links. They also feature an RTM API for event tracking.
Message.io 🔥 Take: Slack is a major player in the enterprise chat world. We are most excited about their permissions feature coming out soon in developer preview. Of particular note is their awesome podcast about the world of work.
Skype
Developer docs: https://dev.skype.com/
What is it: Known most for its ability to connect family and friends to video-based chat, Skype allows team communication, meetings, and conference calls for internal team members or individuals with access to Skype accounts.
Key Product Features:
- A variety of bot personality and response types
- With integrated payments, you can enable safe, secure in-line purchases for customers
- Skype bots interact with customers via chat, voice, or video
- Business use cases range from eCommerce to support
- Apps can be integrated directly into Skype conversations
Why Developers Should Care: The best use cases for you to build into Skype are for team communication, meeting administration, conference calls, or simply reaching Skype users. Any bots that you create via Microsoft Bot Framework will work easily in Skype.
The standout opportunity for developers here is going where the conversation is. That means interacting with customers using bots to strengthen customer support for chat, video, or voice chat. Now, connecting with a customer on a web site is as simple as embedding two-lines of code. With the “Skype Dev Buddy,” developers can stay up to date on Skype bots and more.
Message.io 🔥 Take: Skype is a Microsoft offering that does not require you to run Office 365. Because of its universality, especially globally, it can serve a wide-swath of users for both consumer and enterprise needs in an easy, visual way. They are the biggest competitor to Messenger.
Facebook Workplace
Developer docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace
What is it: Built on the familiar and powerful systems that are home to over a billion registered users, Facebook has used their success and social currency to create a new platform designed purely for work. With the idea of leveraging connections, Workplace seeks to streamline project workflow by allowing the sharing of ideas to teams with the hopes of inspiring morale, reaching goals, and keeping people connected no matter where the office is located.
Key Product Features:
- With Workplace you’re actually getting two distinct products:
- Workplace — the hub of all things that matter to your organization and,
- Work Chat — the place where virtually all of the mobile communication happens between colleagues
- Shared access via Facebook Groups lexicon
- Video conferencing takes shape via Facebook’s Live video services allowing teams to broadcast company updates or more individual sessions right from your mobile device
- Open collaboration with other companies on the platform
- Task automation via bots helps remove workflow redundancies and cut repetitive tasks
- Workplace integrations seamlessly connect to the tools your team already has to exchange ideas, share files, and organize materials
- Dashboard allows for management, reporting of admin controls for your workplace community
Why Developers Should Care: While this is a relatively recent rollout, Facebook has been experimenting with this product internally for years. Facebook owns social, but along the way it has become incredibly competent in messaging. All of the technology present in their messenger is made available in a work context, which is pretty solid and innovative stuff for developers to get their hands on, despite the early stage.
Message.io 🔥 Take: While it’s early days for Workplace, you can’t overlook the successes and wins that Facebook has seen in other verticals, from Messenger, News Feed, and even the rollout of Facebook Live video.
Facebook Workplace is an exciting entrant into the arena of enterprise messaging and collaboration. There’s tons of opportunity to experiment, ideate, test, and become an early adopter. There are also plenty of compelling use cases to expand on project management workflows or to better facilitate team collaboration. Workplace could be a nice solution if you have specific business-use cases or HR benefits that have been relegated to a company Intranet or HR portal that never gets used.
Mattermost
Developer docs: https://docs.mattermost.com/guides/developer.html
What is it: Mattermost is an open-source, private cloud-based alternative to Slack. It’s very secure, easily configurable, and scalable perfect for small teams to enterprise organizations.
Key Product Features:
- Mattermost runs behind your firewall in a single Linux binary, powered by MySQL or PostgreSQL
- Mobile apps can be deployed to an internal Enterprise App Store with Mattermost source code via mobile applications and push notification
- Option for VPN clients on PC, mobile devices outside private networks
- User sessions can be remotely revoked through account settings
- Apps can be easily packaged into Enterprise Mobility Management solutions
- Centralized team management via a web-based console
- Robust access control policies limit communications to specific users, private channels
- Authentication safeguards protect against brute force attacks
- Sessions can be configured in accordance to specific internal policies
Why Developers Should Care: Mattermost is an IT-friendly messaging solution. Because it installs as a compiled binary, it provides your IT team any easy way to deploy and manage the product. Written in Golang and React helps open up integration possibilities with a variety of applications, or build your own functionality that sits nicely atop Mattermost’s core features. There’s also a variety of personalization and rich-formatting options sure to keep your colleagues happy. Enterprise-level support allows hosting and management for dozens of teams from a single server instance and a System Console and tool for management of all the essential IT admin functions.
Message.io 🔥 Take: There’s no question: If you have a bot on Slack today, then you should also be on Mattermost. The reach to potential enterprise customers is too powerful. In addition, these customers are using Mattermost because of its ease of scalability and tight security.
Now it’s your turn to add to this conversation. Be sure to add your comments, stories, and tips for developing conversational bots. You can also ❤️ and share this story with your friends. Be sure to follow us here on Medium as well as LinkedIn and Twitter.
